Analyze This - Vinod Chikkareddy - The Blogosphere

I'm currently working on this small paper on Opportunities in the Blogosphere, meant to be used as a document to get out-of-touch business decision makers interested in the world of blogs. It's my last project here, and I'm doing it under Prof. Sandeep Krishnamurthy, a visiting faculty from the Univ. of Washington, Bothell.

One thing that this paper talks of is the growing influence of the blogosphere as a publishing medium, and its effect on the publication chain. Instead of the traditional [[ author-> editor-> publisher-> reader ]], the blogosphere has a very interesting [[ author-publisher-> reader-editor ]] chain. The author himself is the publisher; and the reader of the blog is the editor, in that he decides what posts gain prominence (by linking to them, etc). The democratic nature of the blogosphere, and its economics (zero-cost), have led to this structure. The implications of this on the current publishing world are immediately obvious.

Another idea in the paper is that of a content summarization service. Google News, for example, aggregates news from known sources, performs a pseudo-summarization, and displays results on a single page. True summarization would be when the web service can actually summarize all the news and present content on a single page. I guess this involves a lot of natural language processing etc, which may be beyond the scope of today's technology, but it's a very useful thing to develop. It would look great sitting on top of Technorati, providing content summarization for searches on the blogosphere. What do you guys think of this?

Yup! I believe this is how newspapers would look in 2020 the future. The blogosphere is surely gonna be the publishing medium of the future, and that also explains why I think Google should acquire Technorati .. and very soon!